I confess that I had been dreading the first day back at work after Thanksgiving. We spent last week up in Omaha visiting my granddaughter, Ann. She is very cute as well as very advanced. See how she can smile already? She is also adept at moving her arms around in the air.

Anyway, it turned out to be fun to come back. I had a pretty interesting and eventful day, complete with some new discoveries. (You’d think that they would start to dry up at some point, but it doesn’t seem like that will happen any time soon.) But even before any of that, as soon as I got to campus this morning I headed over for a look at the view from Anderson Biological Lab north towards the Keith-Wiess Geology building. I posted here about how befuddled I got when I tried to understand some of Professor Davies’s pictures. I thought I was looking from Geology towards Space Science, but there was a pretty strong consensus in the comments that I was really looking from Biology towards Geology.

And they were right! Here’s Davies’s photo:

And here’s my picture from this morning:

The globe lights aren’t there any more (no loss, in my opinion), but otherwise it’s pretty much the same. Also, if you zoom in on Davies’s darker picture you can just make out the plaque built into the wall to the left that you can see clearly in the bright morning light in my picture. It’s an odd thing. I almost walked right past it–it’s nearly invisible because of its color and general wear. You have to click on the photo twice to be able to read any of it at all:

It’s a quote from Pasteur:  “Take interest, I implore you, in those sacred dwellings which one designates by the expressive term: LABORATORIES. Demand that they be multiplied, that they be adorned: these are the temples of the future—temples of well-being and of happiness. There it is that humanity grows greater, stronger, better.”

You’d think we would want people to see that.